


The Book of the Dead

by luminescence (epistolic)



Category: Cloud Atlas (2012), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-24
Updated: 2013-04-24
Packaged: 2017-12-09 09:27:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/772631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/luminescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To love is to destroy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Book of the Dead

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Deutsch available: [Das Buch der Toten](https://archiveofourown.org/works/777382) by [eurydike](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eurydike/pseuds/eurydike)
  * Translation into 中文 available: [亡灵之书](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071281) by [baysian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/baysian/pseuds/baysian)



> This is technically a Cloud Atlas!AU, but to be quite honest the only thing that is remotely Cloud Atlas-esque is the fact that I have written two characters in multiple timelines that eventually tie together. So no knowledge of Cloud Atlas is actually needed! I hope you guys enjoy this ♥

When Model 007 wakes for the very first time, he is within a bare room.

He is lying upon a sheet of metal. Above him, the white, oblivious stretch of paint – a ceiling. Four walls. A white, tiled floor, swept meticulously clean. A white scent within the room. Not a single sound.

He is not certain of where he is. When he casts back into his mind, he finds it neatly organised, labelled and tagged like crates of papers to be filed. A world map. A catalogue of all legal and illegal weaponry currently on the market. A convenient written record of his life, whichever one should be most expedient at any one time: Peter Langley, travelling accountant; Richard Brooke, journalist; Benjamin Livingstone, accomplished lawyer, successful businessman, in the States to visit his mother.

For a long while Model 007 lies on the metal and breathes. It is an almost foreign action – he has to concentrate on it. He has to give it his utmost attention.

From the corner of the room, a light flashes red.

\--

There is a boy leaning over him.

Not a boy. Model 007’s mind, all slick gears and computer code, takes a step back to reassess. A man. Young. Dark hair. Even darker eyes. An imperious, self-assuming arch of the brow.

The man holds out a hand to him.

“Welcome, 007,” the man says. It’s a voice that reminds you of industrial-grade bleach: nothing cleaner, nothing more impersonal in the world than this. “I’m sorry about that unpleasant business, putting you under a second time. There was a bit of a fault in the system. Couldn’t be helped.”

“Couldn’t be helped,” Model 007 echoes, obedient. 

“Are you cold?”

Model 007 considers this. He considers it carefully, following the protocols of his program. “No.”

“Good. There are some clothes draped over the chair.”

The man’s hand draws away, disappears into a pocket. Model 007 finds himself noticing this: every aspect of his being is attuned to his surroundings. His mind recognises and makes note of each potential threat. The corner of the metal table he is on is sharp and can be used to dent a skull. The chair, though bolted to the ground, is made of wood; if necessary, it can be splintered apart with a kick, turned into a weapon. The jumper laid out for him can be used to throttle. 

He stands and reaches for it, goes through the motions of putting it on.

“Are you my maker?” Model 007 says.

The man looks back over at him. “Yes.”

\--

There is a woman, there inside Model 007’s mind.

He cannot really picture her. He can see her silhouette sometimes, when he concentrates; it is like trying to remember a piece of art that you have seen years ago in a museum. He knows that she is slender. He knows that her hair is brown, almost copper, the still sheen of it like steel. But he doesn’t know her name.

Q, who is his maker, lays a piece of paper down flat before him. “Look.”

Model 007 looks. His mind, like a camera, captures the image: _click_.

“His name is Dominique Belaire,” Q says. He folds the paper back up into a neat square, smoothing down each edge with a finger. There is no change in the expression on Q’s face. 

“Dominique Belaire,” Model 007 repeats, mild. “You want him dead?”

“I want him dead.”

\--

In New Paris, Model 007 kills his first man.

At first, he learns. He tracks. From between the broad, flung-out wings of the New Justice Building, Dominique Belaire emerges into the daylight: a small, wiry man, wrapped in a dark felt coat.

Belaire does not live alone. He has a family – two wives, five children, four of them sons. He has a dog. 

During the week, Belaire follows a predictable schedule. He wakes at five each morning, bathes, takes breakfast in the back of his vehicle, arrives at the Justice Building on the dot of six. His lunch is delivered to him at eleven forty-five. Sometimes he has a smoking break; sometimes two. In the evening, he leaves for home: melting into the dark of the evening street, dissipating into its vapours.

Model 007 notes all of this. He documents it, in the sizeable reel that is his memory. 

He kills Dominique Belaire on a Saturday, holds his struggling face beneath the surface of a pool.

Belaire’s daughter is twelve. She is beautiful, even in her funeral black, but Model 007 no longer has a functional concept of beauty. Justice is not a consideration for him. The world, to Model 007, exists only as a place where things must still be done.

\--

When he returns, there is a new body on the metal sheet. It is a woman: the slim bracket of her hips somewhat familiar; some stirring occurs within him at the sight of her face.

Q is sitting nearby typing on a computer. “It is done?”

“Yes,” Model 007 says. He stands with his hands folded neatly behind him. “Who is that woman?”

Q doesn’t look up. “An experiment.”

“Is she dead?”

“No.” Q reaches out, takes her by the hair, turns her head to display her nape. A tuft of wires disappears into her skin at the approximate level of her C7 vertebra. “But she isn’t alive, either.”

“Did you make her?”

Q lets her head drop back down onto the table with a hollow thud, and says nothing.

For a moment, Model 007 tries to remember. He reaches back into the recesses of his memory. He attempts to dredge up a name. Vivian? He looks over at Q’s slender back, the collar of a tea-coloured cardigan hiding his nape from view. He wonders what the back of his own neck looks like. And then he decides that it probably doesn’t matter.

“I need another name,” Model 007 says.

“I will give you one, in time,” Q reassures him.

\--

The second name, Roger Rutherford, presents difficulties.

“ _You_ ,” Rutherford gasps. His face is drained a sleety white; his eyes bulge, his knees almost seem to give out from underneath him, he staggers back against the locked bathroom door with a crash. “ _You_ – no, it can’t be, you’re – you were _dead_ , I saw you myself – ”

“I’m still dead,” Model 007 says.

Rutherford doesn’t seem to have heard him. “I didn’t kill her. I swear it. It wasn’t me, it was Belaire, it was Mitchell, they hired somebody. I had nothing to do with it, I’m just a banker, please, _please_. I’ll move away. I’ll move to Canada. I’ll retire. Anything you want, money, anything, I’ll give it to you.”

Model 007 looks down at the grovelling man. Rutherford is going on seventy-five, and sweat shines in a terrible greasy puddle on his bald patch. 

“I don’t know what you did,” Model 007 says, honestly.

And then he shoots Rutherford twice in the head.

\--

“How does it feel?” Q asks him one night.

The lights are low but harsh. Swamped in it, Q looks as stark and cold as a skeleton. But his voice, dark in the room, is full of an emotion that Model 007 cannot identify.

Q is sitting forward, eager, the look in his eye strangely warped. “Well? How does it feel, killing them?”

Model 007 ponders it. “It feels natural.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“I don’t know,” Model 007 says, surprised. “I don’t really think about it. I just do what I’m told.”

Q’s mouth twists. There is an almost unhinged look about him, like a spring that has been wound too tight for too long a time. The knuckles on his hands leap out like stamps in the dark. “But you don’t feel anything? You’re killing them, you know. Murdering them.”

“It’s not so terrible, being dead,” Model 007 says. “I don’t mind it much, myself.”

“No. Of course not.” Q turns away. “But then, you’re not the one who has to mourn.”

“Rutherford said he didn’t kill her.”

Q gives a short laugh. Back in the warm glow of his computer screen, he looks his old self again. “Wouldn’t you, if you had a gun to your head?”

“Perhaps,” Model 007 concedes. “Who was she?”

“Someone I loved very much,” Q says. “But I suppose you don’t know what that feels like any more. I made sure to erase it from your programming. Because it makes you vulnerable, you see – it makes you blind, makes you weak. And I wanted you to be perfect.”

Model 007 nods. The explanation makes sense, in a smooth, frictionless way.

“Next time,” Q says to him over one shoulder, “I want you to enjoy it.”

\--

One morning, while Q is asleep, Bond comes across her.

It is an accident. He mistakes one door for another. He pushes it open and there she is, sitting up on the metal trolley he himself once laid on, her dark hair coming down past her shoulders and her bare back.

They watch each other for a long time.

“James,” she says at last. She smiles. “James Bond.”

Model 007 shakes his head in confusion. “No, I’m sorry, you have me confused with someone else. My name is Richard Brooke. I’m a journalist. I’m sorry, I forgot to knock.”

“Well, it’s not as if you’ve never seen me naked before.”

“I don’t even know who you are.”

“It’s Vesper.” There is an amused hitch to the side of her mouth. “Stop playing games. Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

She makes to get off the trolley. Her naked limbs are pale, smooth, without a single blemish. Her eyes are a brilliant and lovely green. For a moment Model 007 is so preoccupied with the way she moves – graceful as a cat; data which he stores away dispassionately, planes and vectors, the trajectory of a non-stationary body – that he does not see that there are wires connected to the nape of her neck. Wires connected to a console bolted down on the trolley.

“How can you not _know_ – ” she begins; then she takes a step too far, and the wires rip from her skin.

She collapses. Her body folds over itself, like a puppet with cut strings.

Model 007 stands where he is in the doorway. He looks at her. For the first time the beginnings of something turns inside his breastbone. A memory, which does not belong to him, tickles at the edge of his mind; he feels a sorrow which is not his.

Q comes rushing into the room, wild-eyed. “What are you doing?”

“She fell off the trolley. Her wires came out.”

Q turns on him. Q’s hair is spiky with sleep, a morning looseness still there in the slender limbs. To his surprise Q’s eyes spit fire. Before he is aware of what is happening, Q has hit him across the face.

“You weren’t supposed to touch her, she wasn’t ready yet – ”

“I didn’t go near her. She fell off the trolley herself.”

“But she saw you. She would never have tried to leave, if she hadn’t have seen _you_.”

“She said my name was James,” Model 007 says.

Q stares at him. 

It is in this moment that Model 007 realises how small Q really is. How breakable the human bones, the human skull. A pulse in the neck that can be easily slashed. Ribs to cage the heart, and then nothing else: everything soft and crushable, the liver, the spleen, the loop upon loop of gut. 

He himself does not have any of this. He himself is not privy to all these human fragilities.

“My name isn’t James,” he says. “Is it?”

Q’s eyes cut away, as if ashamed. “No, it isn’t,” Q says. “You don’t have a name.”

\--

Margaret Mitchell is a short, prickly woman. Her white hair is cropped close to her skull.

“So,” she says. She has eyes like dagger-points. Model 007 can almost feel them drawing blood as she rakes over him, taking in the crisp line of his form and the sharp edge of the knife he has in his hand. She is not young – sixty, perhaps. “So, you are his first success.”

Model 007 takes a step forward into the room. He closes the door behind him.

“It’s a remarkable likeness, I’ll give him that. But then he was always very clever.”

“Why does he want you dead?” Model 007 asks.

Mitchell barks out a laugh. “He didn’t tell you?” Then, inexplicably, her lined face softens. “I suppose you never asked. You didn’t like to ask questions, I remember. You liked to be told what to do.”

“You knew me,” Model 007 says.

“I did.”

It is true. Model 007 can feel it. He knows this woman, as surely as he knows that he is not alive. 

“I didn’t kill Vesper,” Mitchell tells him at last, quietly.

And this, Model 007 knows, is also true.

\--

When he comes back, Q is there waiting for him.

There is blood underneath Model 007’s nails. His maker had said, I want you to enjoy it. He hadn’t, really – it was not there within his program, to enjoy or not to enjoy – but he had opened Margaret Mitchell’s belly anyway, plunged his hands in, ripped up from under the ribs until he had taken her throbbing heart into his hand.

Q’s eyes dart down to his palms. “You should wash.”

“Yes,” Model 007 says.

\--

That night, Model 007 wakes to the sound of his door being slowly opened. An inch of light creeps across the floor.

“Are you awake?” Q says into the dark.

Model 007 sits up in bed. His eyes adjust automatically to the shadows of the room. Q is barefoot; when he closes the door he leans his entire body back with the movement, presses his spine against the wood.

For a while they look at each other without a word. 

Then Q pushes himself off of the door. He comes to stand by the bed, his knee almost brushing the side of Model 007’s bare hip. The cardigan Q has on is unbuttoned and the white of his shirt, alien in the half-light, paints a long strip down the length of his body. Model 007 allows his eyes to follow it – the bony hips, the even bonier shins and ankles, obvious even from underneath the fabric of Q’s trouser pants.

Model 007 opens his mouth but Q beats him to it: “Don’t speak.”

Model 007 snaps his mouth shut again.

Q rests one knee on the mattress – slowly, as if testing the waters. He braces a hand against Model 007’s shoulder. Then he swings his other knee over Model 007’s body, a careful motion, the discreet rustle of fabric on his slender frame, a sharp intake of breath let out shakily from between his teeth.

“She can’t have you.” Mashed against the skin of Model 007’s temple, like a vow.

“I don’t understand,” Model 007 says.

Q leans down. “She can’t have you,” he says again, and kisses him.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been a long while since I've written Skyfall fic, hopefully it's still passable. Updates will come as soon as I can manage them!
> 
> Any and all feedback is much appreciated! For updates on this and any future fics, feel free to add me on [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


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